Gloria Steinem Brings Feminism to Viceland

WASHINGTON — Gloria Steinem and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were engrossed in conversation steps from his ceremonial office, where he was getting his makeup done. Ms. Steinem, already prepped, was here to interview him for “Woman,” her new Vice TV show.

She skipped past notes her producers had readied about their topic, “It’s on Us,” the White House’s pledge initiative against sexual assault, and led with her own question: What motivated him to take on this cause? She pressed him on gender-related problems in the military — “the culture is changing,” he said, in part because of advocates like her. A photo of “Joe and Glo” was snapped for her new Instagram account.

After the vice president strode away, young White House staffers stepped in to angle for their own selfies. Seen-it-all aides went rapt as Ms. Steinem recounted her experience as a 17-year-old in Washington (“We made it a project to swim in all the fountains”), the first president she remembers (Franklin D. Roosevelt) and the times she picketed outside the Capitol (numerous).

While Ms. Steinem, 82, has clocked a half-century as an activist, journalist and feminist leader, “Woman” is the first time she has produced and hosted a TV series. Beginning on Tuesday, it will run on the new cable channel Viceland, exploring in eight weekly episodes human rights and violence against women around the world, from child marriage in Zambia to sexual attacks in the United States military. It is not an easy watch, but Ms. Steinem was adamant that it would present a complex portrait of its subjects, as survivors and advocates, and offer viewers a way to become involved.

“What I hope is, seeing it will be the closest thing to being on the ground yourself,” she said. “It is being a witness. And people in hard times need a witness, and somebody who can help.”

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Gloria Steinem and Ariel Wengroff at the Vice network’s offices.CreditMalin Fezehai for The New York Times

In her focus on first-person accounts and D.I.Y. support systems, Ms. Steinem is aligned with the interests of millennial audiences — the kind that Vice, in their unlikely partnership, hopes to deliver. What that demographic, newly awoken to her legacy, might not realize is how well Ms. Steinem — a social networker even before she joined Twitter; a nondriver; a voracious traveler who has spent most of her career without a formal job; and a lifelong rule-breaker who can rock a raised fist and a raunchy punch line — fits in with them already.

“I think she’s a hero,” said Shane Smith, a founder of Vice who greenlit the show.

The two met at a Google conference in 2014, where she talked about the global upsurge in violence against women “and the fact that it was now extreme enough so that there are fewer females on earth than males,” she recalled.

Mr. Smith was listening. “She gave a speech and then I bawled my eyes out,” he said. “I was blown away” by her storytelling and the wealth of her experience. Given her connections and insight, he added, “I realized she was a natural producer.”

But their collaboration was hardly an obvious match: Vice made its name on bro-centric content, heavy on the danger-zone posturing, gross-out humor and dopey stoner antics. (Even its nerdiest cable show is called “Balls Deep.”) And as the brand’s poster boy, Mr. Smith, a major onscreen presence in Vice’s separate HBO show, has reveled in a cussing, anti-authoritarian persona even as he became a vaunted, and wealthy, chief executive.

Ms. Steinem knew of Vice’s “very masculine reputation,” as she put it. So before she committed to the series, which began development in October 2014, she sniffed around for any trouble and emerged at ease. “It felt to me like an organization that had started one way and was becoming much more universal,” she said in an interview in Vice’s clubby offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “What it reminded me of was New York magazine,” where she landed early in her career in the 1960s. “That was totally male — Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe, and all these writers. And that also was open to change.” (A subsidy from New York’s editor Clay Felker enabled Ms. Steinem and others to start Ms. Magazine in 1971.)

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Ms. Steinem after her arrest in 1984 at an anti-apartheid demonstration.CreditBettman Archive/Getty Images

It helped that the team for “Woman” was almost entirely female, led by a group of female producers, among them Ariel Wengroff, a 26-year-old with a background in politics. Before she landed at Vice two years ago, Ms. Wengroff had never worked on, let alone created, a TV show.

It was a “complete leap of faith,” she said of working on “Woman,” which she and Mr. Smith developed with the Vice News producer Iris Xu, Ms. Steinem and her longtime associate Amy Richards. From the crew up, it is the most heavily female-staffed program in Viceland’s lineup. (The company also began Broadly, an online channel oriented toward women, in 2015.)

Ms. Steinem has other TV credits and talk show offers were dangled over the years, but they required too much time, she said, and she wasn’t keen on network oversight. “Vice feels much more able to move quickly,” she said.

Back in New York, she invited some compatriots to the Soho House for a first feedback screening: leaders from the Ford Foundation and Equality Now, along with Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner. They watched the series’ wrenching premiere about rape as a tool of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Episodes begin and end with Ms. Steinem speaking to the camera about the challenges facing women, but the bulk of the reporting is handled by young international correspondents, chosen by Vice, who straddle the line between journalist and activist, as Ms. Steinem does. They shot in eight countries; an episode in Pakistan, directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, this year’s Oscar winner for documentary short, is still in progress.

Ms. Steinem did not travel with them, but her expertise paved the way. “Gloria brought a whole different level of credibility and access to women on the ground that we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” Ms. Wengroff said, suggesting “where we could and couldn’t go, who she felt was credible and who she’s worked with, and who also is new that we could empower.”

The host of the debut episode, Isobel Yeung, journeys along bumpy roads to meet a warlord, and is barred from an interview despite having arranged for access — a marker of authenticity in this documentary style. She is also visibly distraught by the horrors her subjects reveal. In typical Vice fashion, the camera cuts back often to capture correspondents’ reactions, their tears and outrage. Ms. Steinem loved this intimate take: an emotional entry point.

After the screening, the audience swapped resources. Ms. Steinem wanted more footage online of women sharing their survival stories. “We have to figure out how strong they are, and how to leave hope,” she said. “The challenge is to know, and not despair, and figure out how to make it better a little bit at a time.”

For Ms. Steinem, hatching ideas about grass-roots networking — how to introduce one rebel group to another, say — is as elemental as breathing. “There’s nothing better than empathy,” she said a few days later, at Vice’s offices. It was her first visit to its new headquarters, a sprawling refurbished warehouse, with a coffee bar on the ground floor and solar power on the terrace, and she turned a few heads. But wearing a snug leather jacket, skinny black pants and a keffiyeh-style scarf, she hardly looked out of place — though she was, almost certainly, the oldest person there.

The generational divide between Ms. Steinem and many in her circle is inescapable and also somewhat irrelevant. She’s a cultural magpie — she’ll quote the organizing principles of Black Lives Matter, mention doing a version of the disco move the Bump in Zambia, and reference the French statesman Georges Clemenceau (“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music”). “I think I’m like an overstimulated 6-year-old,” she said, “because there’s so many things, and they’re so interesting!”

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Alice Speri, left, a host on “Woman,” with rebel soldiers in Colombia.CreditArianna LaPenne for Viceland

In an email, her friend Lena Dunham wrote: “Something amazing about Gloria is that she is totally not content to rest on her laurels or stick to mediums she’s comfortable with. It’s the reason she remains so deeply relevant — that refusal to settle in.”

Ms. Steinem was at Vice to watch footage of her interview with Mr. Biden and to give notes on an episode about female fighters in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a rebel group.

She was warned that the chairs in the screening room reclined. “But do they vibrate?” she said.

Then she got down to business. She turned away when her face appeared on screen — even after a lifetime, she doesn’t like watching herself. She still gets anxious about public speaking, too. “I had chosen to be two things in my life, a dancer and a writer,” she said, “because I didn’t want to talk. But I’m grateful. The fact that no editor would print what I wanted to write, forced me into talking.”

She can still rile, as she learned after some comments she made about Bernie Sanders’s and Hillary Clinton’s popularity with young women were, she said, misconstrued. “If I had meant what they thought I meant, I’d be mad at me too,” she said, of the idea that some young women support Mr. Sanders only because men do. She was talking about the allocation of power, not boyfriends, she said, and gladly took to social media to explain herself. “It’s very important to experience at least one Twitter war,” she said, explaining later: “It was very educational. Lots of bad things have happened to me, but not with such brevity.”

For the Vice team, Ms. Steinem’s presence has been a series of pinch-me moments. “I’m lucky to be working with her,” Mr. Smith, the Vice executive, said. Though he’s reported from North Korea and covered jihadis, some of the hardships that “Woman” details were new to him. “I found lots of it difficult to watch,” he said, and grew pensive. “This is going to get very hippie-dippie,” he said. “I believe the universe gave me daughters” — his are 4 and 5 — “to help me understand the world better.”

Ms. Steinem was impressed by her all-female Vice crew, too, whom she saw as emblematic of a generation striving not against what is, but toward what can be. “They are smart, caring and fast,” she wrote in an email. She even proudly sported some company bling — a gold ring that spells out Vice, given to its top brass — although she did ask, “Is this gender-free jewelry?”

Assured that it was worn by all sexes, she kept it on.

Correction:

An article last Sunday about a new Viceland TV show hosted and produced by Gloria Steinem misstated the number of weekly episodes that will air. It is eight, not 10.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR16 of the New York edition with the headline: Finding Feminism in a Boys’ Club. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe